


Glow

by undertheteacup



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Chronic Pain, F/F, Insomnia, Other, Suicide mention, Trauma and Cuddling, Xenophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 13:27:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13835649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/undertheteacup/pseuds/undertheteacup
Summary: On one of the most difficult nights of the Reaper Wars, Shepard can't sleep and the Rachni Queen pays her a visit.





	Glow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hobbitdragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hobbitdragon/gifts).



> Spoilers for ME3 (Priority: Thessia).

They came for her in the night.

 

In space there is never anything but night, deep and endless. No matter how hard the atmospheric regulators and full spectrum lighting might try to convince one otherwise.

 

Her old scars had been acting up again. She tossed and turned, at once wracked by chills and clammy with sweat. A burning, buzzing pain radiated along the seams where her body joined with Cerberus’s foreign, invasive tech, refusing to let her rest. Flashes of Lieutenant Kurin and her squad replayed in her mind over and over. They had stayed because they believed in her, and it had been for nothing. No catalyst, no end to the war.

 

When the nauseating images of past regrets rolled as far back as Corporal Toombs shooting his brains out in the Ontarom labs, Shepard finally dragged herself out of bed. For once she was glad that Tali, Liara, and Ashley were each struggling with their own demons and had chosen their quarters over her bed.

 

She stared at the fishes in her aquarium and she stirred the sweet, grainy purple drink Mordin had concocted for her back when she was lucky to get several hours of sleep in as many days. “A mild sedative,” he’d said, “useful not only in its chemical properties but as a sensory anchor: taste, touch, smell.”

 

That was when she felt it. Like a melody you can only just make out, and then only if you turn your head just so. A mote of dust floating on air in her peripheral vision. A _sound movement presence_ , so small at first that it took every ounce of her energy and attention just to track its existence. It grew larger and closer every moment until it was an all-encompassing beat in veins and lungs and bones, and the shadows swallowed her up.

 

* * *

 

 

She rested on earth, or maybe stone. But smooth and warm under her limbs. Darkness cradled her. The air brought strange and long-forgotten scents of wetness and earth.

 

She was filled with inexplicable elation, a blessed wellbeing, and completely disoriented about how this could possibly relate to her surroundings, until she was standing almost without having to think. And she wasn’t in any pain. Instead of grating, her limbs felt loose and comfortable at her sides.

 

Dimly she registered the shifting orange glow emitted by globes above her head. They were asymmetrical, uneven, and upon breathing in their musk she realized they were mushrooms, alight with their own pulsing chemical reaction. The walls were studded with more fungi, dimmer and smaller, creating whirling patterns that curled about the room. She ran her hand carefully over the wall, her palm dipping and rising with the whorls of its surface. How could stone feel so _soft_?

 

She wasn’t alone. Behind her, almost entirely hidden in shadows, an enormous many-legged shape crouched.

 

A part of Shepard’s mind, the lizard-brain part that humans still have even after all these years away from the soils and waters of their home planet, screamed in terror and fled. She expected this of herself. What surprised her was how small that part was, and how the rest stayed. She felt and understood the terror, oh yes; but more deeply felt, much less understood, was the awe. The anticipation.

 

The Queen’s antennae trembled, as if sensing the shift of Shepard’s awareness through the change of vibrations in the air.

 

Slowly, ever so slowly, she rose and unfolded, continued rising until Shepard had to crane her neck to look at her and the flexible dimensions of this surreal place stretched to accommodate her. Most of her body was continually lost in shadow, the magnificence of her true form impossible to comprehend by Shepard’s all too human eyes.

 

Her head descended from above, bowed nearer to Shepard’s forehead, antennae still trembling. Shepard barely resisted the urge to press her own forehead to the Queen’s and kiss her between her compound eyes.

 

She opted for the obvious instead.

 

“Is… this a dream?” she asked.

 

“Not dream, but memory.”

 

Shepard wasn’t surprised to feel the rumble of the Queen’s voice directly in her mind. She had wondered what it would mean to encounter the Queen directly, when there was no Krogan corpse or dying Asari huntress to borrow and speak through.

 

What she did not expect was hearing the Queen speak in endless, overlayed echoes of her own voice. A rougher, deeper, and infinitely more melodious interpretation, to be sure, but nevertheless hers.

 

She looked around at the beautiful chamber, the patterns of glowing lichens and mushrooms along the walls, listened to the chiming of crystals in the caves.

 

“You’ve been here?”

 

“We have not. It is Suen. The hatching place of our songmothers, now destroyed.”

 

They walked together down gently sloping, spiral pathways opening into oval chambers. Some were obviously meant for food storage, shelves of organic matter lined along the walls. Others seem like workshops, pieces of technology and tools scattered about.

 

They paused at the edge of a grand hall stretching out above and below, pillars of stone scattered throughout, an immense clear lake at its center. Algae grew in the water, lighting the whole room with their silver glow.

 

Everywhere had the air of unreality Shepard had felt since the beginning. But nothing felt as eerie as the faint echoes of long-dead Rachni workers moving everywhere about the place. Carrying loads, congregating in hallways, building and living.

 

“It’s beautiful,” said Shepard. She turned to the Queen. “I’m sorry it’s all gone.”

 

“It seems that is the song of our galaxy. The silencers came to our nests, and their broods have been quieted in turn. But now we have hope. We will defeat the machines. We will rebuild.”

 

“Why did you come?” asked Shepard.

 

“We heard your keening. You are the reason the songmothers’s memories can be remembered at all. We plucked the strings of the universe to bring your mind to harmony.”

 

Eyes filling with tears, Shepard looked out again at the blue cavern, the glimmer of lake-light.

 

“Do you miss it?” she said, and felt suddenly stupid. Was it possible to miss something you’ve never experienced? Something you’ve only ever imagined, only known in stories?

 

“We miss the chirp of the other mothers, the rasp and rustle of them against each other. It is so that we sleep. So slept, together.” There was a change in the Queen’s voice, a hesitation. “But we…I. I am alone. It was not meant to be so. I call to my children to nest with me, but it is not the same.”

 

Shepard turned to her. The Queen’s armored limbs were a magnificent blue-black gleam of chitin. By degrees, Shepard raised a hand and the Queen folded down upon herself again, until she barely towered above Shepard’s head. The ridges and bumps of her thorax could not be seen, so Shepard closed her eyes and let herself simply feel, the brush of integument on skin setting off a rasping purr.

 

There were no special bedchambers for Rachni Queens, or perhaps the chambers they inhabited most of their lives were all for sleep. The Queen carried Shepard to one of those chambers, wrapped up in her mandibles. They curled together, listening to the songs of stars, and slept.


End file.
